High Speed Beowulf Cluster using gigabit ethernet
Ole W Saastad
ole at scali.no
Mon Feb 4 00:12:14 PST 2002
Ad. GBE interconnect.
Have you tested your applications with gigabit ethernet ?
The latency with GBE and fast ethernet are almost the same,
and while you get much higher bandwidth (not 100 MB/sec, unfortunately)
but substantially more than with 100 fast ethernet, the latency
is still a showstopper for many applications.
GBE is still relatively expensive and you might be better of spending
your extra money on more nodes or a high performance interconnect.
If your applications are sensitive to latency you get a large gain
in performance when changing to an interconnect with low latency.
SCI is such an interconnect with bandwidths over 300 MB/sec and a
latency of less than 4 us.
--
Ole W. Saastad, Dr.Scient.
Scali AS P.O.Box 150 Oppsal 0619 Oslo NORWAY
Tel:+47 22 62 89 68(dir) mailto:ole at scali.no http://www.scali.com
SCALI - Scalable Linux Systems - Affordable Supercomputing
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